I have tried animation before but I've never really had that good of instruction, whenever I did try I got frusted either because a.) became discouraged from other animations and told myself I'd always suck or b.) Side tracked. Whenever I watch animations they look so clean and solid but I always did it frame by frame, is that the ONLY way you can do animation? Because it doesn't seem like a lot of people do it frame by frame. And if anybody has a good tutorial and such on how to do animation please help.

At 4/29/12 02:06 AM, JJC09081989 wrote:
I have tried animation before but I've never really had that good of instruction, whenever I did try I got frusted either because a.) became discouraged from other animations and told myself I'd always suck or b.) Side tracked. Whenever I watch animations they look so clean and solid but I always did it frame by frame, is that the ONLY way you can do animation? Because it doesn't seem like a lot of people do it frame by frame. And if anybody has a good tutorial and such on how to do animation please help.

This is going to sound very cliche but it's all about practising. Start off with bouncing balls and walking cycles for stick figures and slowly it'll become easier. Watching flash/animation tutorials is also a good way to get started. But they're not gonna learn you everything, you'll need to experiment with poses and expressions. I always get motivation by watching other flashes here on newgrounds.

About the smooth animation. You may already know about it but the key for smooth animation as a beginner are tweens. Look it up on youtube or google it. A tween basically makes the animation for you. The dangerous thing about tweening though is that if you use too many tweens, your animation will start to look 'fake'. So you should always mix between FBF and tweens.

Also important is that you develop your own style. You can practise this by just drawing faces (expressions), object and backgrounds. Even without the animation you should be able to create a style that people can recognize.